Compared to landscapes, seascapes have always appeared less tangible—at once enigmatic and threatening, but also representing hope, adventure, and communication between distant places and people. Although these familiar attitudes toward the sea still persist, headlines about the sea these days more often than not concern catastrophes that occur on and in it, from the Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the nuclear disaster that engulfed northern Japan following an immense tsunami in 2011.

The Sea-Image: Visual Manifestations of Port Cities and Global Waters (Newgray) addresses the sea as defined by various manifestations of the global economy and the flow of goods and bodies across national and international territories. It proposes and develops visual and narrative strategies to tackle the particularities and potentialities that the sea presents. The book is the result of visual research by an international group of artists, scholars, and writers, including Ursula Biemann and Shuruq A. M. Harb, T. J. Demos, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, Vyjayanthi Rao, Alex Villar, Relli De Vries, and xurban_collective (Guven Incirlioglu and Hakan Topal). The panel, featuring Rao, Villar, Incirlioglu, and Keller Easterling, will be moderated by Topal.

Please join us for the next installment of "Talk Show" hosted by David Levine. Dedicated to exploring professions whose intricacies are often wondered at but rarely explored, "Talk Show" uses the typical broadcast format—interviewer, monologue, special guests—to explore the atypical topic of the world of work. Other variations on the form include: no actual broadcast, questions from the audience, and a sideman [sic] who mixes cocktails.

This installment of "Talk Show" at Cabinet will feature a department store santa and a storefront psychic, as well as a slide presentation by Nikki Columbus on "interspecies animal friendships."

Each installment will also include a brand-new complimentary cocktail invented by sideman [sic] and master mixologist Eben Klemm, and a naming contest for said cocktail.

For more on the earlier installments of "Talk Show," including audio and images, see here, here, and here.

In 1922, the distinguished Cambridge physicist C. V. Boys teamed up with a coterie of sporting archers, colonial old hands, and creepy amateur medievalists who convened as London's Royal Toxophilite Society to build the ultimate bow weapon: a giant steel crossbow, built according to the dictates of modern ballistics, and so powerful and unwieldy that it had to be mounted on the swivel station of an anti-aircraft gun. Why? Whale shooting. And not just any whale shooting. Whale shooting for science. It did not end well.

Nor did the larger story of whales and science in the twentieth century. From monstrous kegs of fat and fertilizer (bombed, blasted, stripped, and immolated) to soulful, musical friends of humanity (bellwethers of environmental irresponsibility and totems of the counterculture)—cetaceans have swum a strange transit through the collective imagination over the last century. Across the same period, factory whalers hunted nearly all populations of large marine mammals to brink of collapse.

In this new book, Burnett tells the sweeping story of whales as "problems of knowledge" since 1900. Weaving Melvillian madness with industrial killing, new age environmentalism with Cold War mindcraft, the mathematical minutiae of population modeling with the bluster of international politics, The Sounding of the Whale is an eight-hundred-page effort to come to terms with what may be human beings' most troubled relationship with another animal.

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